'Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory' airs January 12 on HBO.
Social Issue Docs
Lee Hirsch's 'Bully' opens March 30 through The Weinstein Company.
At the start of Violet Du Feng’s Sundance-debuting The Dating Game we learn that, due to the former one-child policy, China now has 30 million more men than women, an eye-catching number that presents dire implications for the country. But behind the cold facts are flesh and blood human beings—and potential clients for a dating coach named Hao. While the doc is specific to China, it’s also universal in its critique of how capitalism, consumerism, and social media collide to create a generation that assumes everyone is faking who they are and therefore concludes that they too must “fake it to make it.” A week before the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiere today, Documentary reached out to Feng, whose Peabody and Emmy-nominated Hidden Letters (2022) tackled gender stereotypes from the female side. This interview has been edited.
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright remembers colleagues asking, “Why do you live in Texas?” when his location shouldn’t have been exceptional
The story of solitary confinement is impossibly cruel—a collection of enduring deprivations that add up to a horror that can never be fully captured by mere stats. To describe it is to consider a place ensnared by windowless brick, with scarred and rutted walls depicting agitation, unease, and in some cases, the mania of a previous occupant. It’s another world, meticulously crafted to intensify the feeling of not being of this world. But while the practice comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, there are still institutional symbols of resilience, as exemplified by the longest prison hunger strike in California history.
In 2022, experimental documentarian Ben Russell approached the filmmaker and visual artist Guillaume Cailleau about making a documentary, set in ZAD
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Holly Hardman’s As Prescribed . This feature documentary exposes the personal and social
Though veteran director-producer Amy Nicholson has crafted feature-length films (2012’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride , 2005’s Muskrat Lovely
Documentary spoke with codirectors Suh and Mones about how their film “Sorry/Not Sorry” evolved as they learned the full story of the women wrapped up in Louis C.K.'s destructive orbit.
To learn about Josh Fox’s multimedia extravaganza,‘The Edge of Nature’, Documentary caught up with the veteran director-playwright-environmental activist the week after The Edge of Nature’s run at NYC’s LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which critic Bernie Sanders succinctly deemed “great work.”